How to make your team future-ready?

Automation, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, bots- these words and others often pop up in conversations about how workplaces would evolve in the future.

While opinions regarding the application of such technologies have created people on the extremes and in between- including fervent proponents and doomsayers, everyone agrees one one thing: For organizations-more precisely, those who work in them- to be future ready, the leaders should take proactive measures.

And it’s high time they did so. For changes, as you surely would have noticed, are underway.

An estimate from McKinsey Global Institute is that about 375 million workers in the world would need to learn new skills by 2030 if they are to keep up with how their present jobs evolve with the rise in automation and other innovations.

Given this backdrop, how could organizations be future-ready?

Change agents who have their future vision charted out are on a forward course

Define your vision

The first thing to do is define your vision for the future: the ideal that would help you guide your team or organization. What with information and insights about science and technology being more easily accessible today than ever before, you could smartly forecast the shape of things to come, at least to a certain extent.

The harder step is realizing a vision that is truly unique, which is born in your own self. Equally challenging is placing that vision in the context of the future that’s unfolding around you.

For realizing your True Personal Vision, Temenos Vision lab or TVL is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility. Using 25 years of business consultancy experience and psychological insights, some of the best leadership coaches guide you to your vision.

Once you have realized your vision, the next step is to determine the processes that would be required to reach that goal (to manifest the vision, so to speak). By extension, you should also decide the number of people each process requires.

Once these things are decided, then it’s time to ensure that the team members have the necessary skills to perform the processes they are a part of. The idea of context- the collective past experience of a team- is useful in this scenario.

Define the vision for each team

Now that you have created the teams or silos depending on the processes and the number of people required for each, it’s time to define the vision for each team.

The catch is that the vision should be organic -pertaining to the process the team is involved in and the mindset/ skills of the individuals. Also, the shared vision should be compelling enough for them to stay inspired.

In the process, the team members would do quite a bit of self-reflection and share their own values and aspirations with each other. This is done with the visual aid called influence maps in which the team members literally visualize their aspirations which they then share with others.

The individual team member’s personal vision is aligned with the compelling shared vision

Equip team members mentally for learning new skills

As you may well assume, preparing for the future demands a consistent upgradation of skills: In other words, the change agents should be on a continued learning curve.

Butt the irony is that even if a change agent knows the value of continual learning, they may still l remain reluctant to add to their skills or expand their view about work or the broader world.

These inhibitions are often born from the misapprehensions they got from poor experiences in the past. Maybe they tried something new in the past and it failed, which scared them so much they feel reluctant to try anything new.Or maybe they had a bad experience working along with people while undertaking a new endeavor.

Whatever be the reasons, these incidents have left deep impressions in their psyche, impressions that became stumbling blocks for progress.

What makes solving this problem hard is that the mental blocks are often deeply personal- at least, the change agents usually perceive them in such a way. Also, these are realities they have pushed to the back of their minds, and which they don’t particularly like being reminded of.

Such considerations have led to the creation of the Clean Slate- a unique session incorporated in TVL. The session encourages deep self-reflection, so the change agent could assess their own thoughts and reasoning and identify the ones which pull them back from proceeding further.

With the guidance of expert trainers, these negativities are then weeded out- a cleansing process which leaves them with only those mental aspects that help them evolve with more confidence on a learning trajectory.

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We invite you to this special gathering, which brings together a group of wonderful people who fill workplaces with joy and energy. By connecting with each other, you embark on a journey that leads to better clarity about the changes you seek, gain collaboration opportunities and leave with a concrete action plan.